10 Ways New York Has Changed Since Obama Lived Here Last

Among the many takeaways from a lengthy new read on Barack Obama in Politico is that the president reportedly plans to live in New York after leaving office. That’s a bit of a surprise, given his relationship with Chicago, where he cut his teeth as an activist, lawyer, and politician, and where his former chief of staff is now mayor.

But perhaps Obama’s desire to live in the city isn’t all that unexpected. After all, the president has written extensively of the time he spent living in New York the early 1980s, mentioning at least three separate neighborhoods: Harlem (E. 94th Street), the Upper West Side (109th Street), and Park Slope, in Brooklyn (Second Street). And, of course, the president and First Lady come to the city often for events and occasional dates, though fund-raising dinners with Vogue editor Anna Wintour are presumably a far cry from his years at Columbia.

The New York that the Obamas will reportedly move to sometime in or after 2016 is in many ways a different city than the one Obama lived in as an undergraduate and early-career employee of the New York Public Interest Research Group. Let us count the ways.

2. Rent is way more expensive. Obama paid $360 for rent at his U.W.S. apartment. In 2012, the same unit was listed for $2,400.

3. The city is much safer than it was when Obama left it in the 80s. Homicide rates continued to climb and peaked in 1990, when 2,245 people were murdered in New York. By 2013, the number of murder victims dropped to 333.

4. There’s another president in town. The Clinton Foundation, which long resided in Harlem, now has offices in multiple spots in Manhattan. Per Politico, Obama is thinking of starting a foundation similar to the Clinton Global Initiative.

5. It’s still pretty risky to smoke weed in New York. Obama’s marijuana usage during his time in Hawaii is pretty well documented, and there’s no evidence to suggest he quit partaking once he moved east. But if a post-White Hosue Obama decides to return to sparking up, he should probably keep it indoors. Despite Mayor Bill de Blasio’s pledge to lower the number of arrests for small-time possession, more than 7,000 New Yorkers were arrested for possessing small amounts of marijuana in the first three months of this year. Eighty-six percent of the arrested were black or Latino. Neither de Blasio nor N.Y.P.D. commissioner Bill Bratton are fans of decriminalization.

6. People can walk in the streets in Times Square, without fear of being mugged or even interacting with automobiles, and there are hundreds of miles of new bike lanes that the president can avail himself of (clad in mom jeans and safety helmet, natch).

8. You can hardly smoke anywhere. Bloomberg’s war on smoking didn’t make it to the city’s sidewalks, but pretty much everywhere else—indoor spaces, parks—is off-limits to smokers. Obama has labored to kick his nicotine habit throughout his presidency, but it’s always possible he’ll quit trying to quit after leaving office.

9. Subway performers are getting arrested. The N.Y.P.D.’s Bratton, a former head of the New York Transit Police, is a big fan of the “broken windows” theory of cracking down on minor crimes. It’s hard to imagine the young, community-organizer version of Obama agreeing with a plan that puts poor kids dancing on the train in prison, but then again, it was also hard to imagine a young community organizer growing up to be a president who didn’t close Gitmo.

10. There’s a lot of traffic in the city, particularly when Barack Obama visits.